Slaw guest blogger Neil Melliship of Clark Wilson LLP canvasses the law to assess the legality of downloading music in Canada.
Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP
Copyright
Clement and Moore Embrace Canada’s Digital Future
Appeared in the Toronto Star on June 29, 2009 as Ministers Finally Embrace Canada's Digital Future With attention mounting on the need for a national digital strategy, Industry Minister Tony Clement brought together 150 leaders from across the country last week for a major conference called Canada's Digital Economy: Moving […]
Copyright Board Releases Educational Copyright Decision
The Copyright Board of Canada has released its long delayed decision on photocopying in primary and secondary schools. There are two ways of looking at these decisions – the dollar amount of the tariff and the reasoning. The dollar amount in this case is big – jumping from the current fee of $2.45 per full-time student (FTE) to $5.16 per FTE. Note that this goes back to 2005 (although the back pay will be set at $4.64 per FTE), so this represents a huge additional cost to Canadian education and a major source of revenue for Access Copyright. The Board goes through a detailed analysis of how it arrived at this figure, but at the end of the day, it feels like that it simply split the difference between the two sides. Access Copyright was seeking $8.92, while the schools argued for $2.43 – that averages to $5.67 per FTE and the Board's award is just below that figure. Whether this is just coincidental or by-design, the current system encourages big requests which set a framework for "reasonableness" that can result in major increases in royalties.
The core aspect of the reasoning is the Board's assessment of fair dealing.
Knopf on the Moore Speech
Howard Knopf provides his take on the James Moore and Tony Clement speeches this week at the Digital Economy conference.
Unravelling the Canadian Copyright Policy Laundering Strategy
The Conference Board of Canada plagiarism and undue influence story – which with the Board's report and overdue apology to Curtis Cook will now go on hiatus until new reports are issued in the fall – has obviously attracted considerable interest. Looking back, while plagiarism is rare, it is the public airing of the copyright lobby policy laundering effort that is the far more important development.
This lengthy post seeks to unravel the effort further by demonstrating how there has been a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation. The following diagram highlights the key players:
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